Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 7, 2009

Translate PDF Files and Office Documents

This seems to be a recent change: Google Translate can now be used to translate PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. Google first converts the document to the HTML format and then it displays the translated HTML file.

The nice thing is that Google converts the documents on the fly even if they haven't been indexed by Google. Just paste the address of a document in Google Translate's textarea and wait until the translation shows up. Unfortunately, the service is not well-suited for long documents: it only translated the first 9 pages of a PDF file.

I get some unreadable translations with safari and firefox browsers, is this browser issue or?By unreadable I mean the text is not formatted properly and the words are one over other all over the translated document (pdf in my case)

well.. it might not be as good at it looks. PDF files are notoriously difficult to convert. Usually converters insert a line break at the end of each line. So if you look very cloesely, you might find that the context is lost at every line end and that the new line is treated as a new sentence.

There are also several PDF translators available. Best of those have a price but they are still affordable to most people. Those translators translate even large PDF files with just a few clicks. Just type PDF translator into Google to find any of those translation tools.

To Alex: As far as I know for example Multilizer PDF Translator maintains the images and the layout of the original file into the translated file as well.

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